Printer-friendly

Contact Author

November 8, 2005

How Much Is That Stadium in the Window?

Determining the True Public Costs of Big-League Ballparks

by Neil deMause

We do it all the time. When discussing stadium finance, sports journalists are used to casually tossing off figures as if they came straight from the pages of the Baseball Encyclopedia: Safeco Field, $517 million. Miller Park, $414 million. Pac Bell Park, $306 million (but just $15 million from the public).

We do all this knowing full well that these numbers--sometimes supplied by the teams themselves, sometimes through a sort of spontaneous accretion of news reports--never tell the whole story. While the official figures may be true as far as construction costs go, how then to account for the $1-a-year lease payments, "operating costs" funds, tax breaks and other goodies that play a key role when teams and cities sit down to negotiate a new stadium deal? But we use the official numbers nonetheless, because no one has undertaken the gargantuan task of poring through leases and tax rolls to determine precisely who wins and loses how much from these deals.

No one, that is, until urban planner Judith Grant Long.

Several years ago, as a doctoral student in urban affairs at Harvard, Long decided to set aside her chosen dissertation topic of untangling the public-private partnerships behind the Olympics, in favor of what was, by comparison, a more straightforward problem: How cities and teams decide to split the costs of pro sports stadiums. The goal, she explains, was to determine "whether or not cities and county governments were learning from each other how to make better deals over time."

To do this, though, Long first needed to compile data on the true costs of stadiums and arenas to the public treasury. This May, the results of her labor appeared in the Journal of Sports Economics: a study titled "Full Count: The Real Cost of Public Funding for Major League Sports Facilities," which included a chart of all 99 major pro sports facilities in operation in 2001, along with their publicly reported--and actual--public costs.

The most common omissions from the public record, Long found, included: land and infrastructure costs; ongoing annual expenses required by the stadium lease; and property tax exemptions, an often-substantial subsidy that has become de rigueur for almost all U.S. sports facilities. (The Canadian-born Long notes that in her native land, property tax on sports facilities is "a huge source of revenue," a recurring gripe of Canadian NHL teams that chafe at the tax breaks lavished on their neighbors to the south.)